photo project thursday | fall in love. take photos. repeat.

For Christmas, Tim bought me a book called “Photo Idea Index: Things” by Jim Krause, which is a neat little portfolio of sorts, with literally, just photos of things inside of it. I read the first chapter this morning during breakfast (gluten free, gingerbread pancakes, I’ll have you know) and I saw a panel of pinhole photos. It got me curious, so Tim and I spent the morning figuring out how to turn my camera into a pinhole camera, without all the fuss of film and shoeboxes. I think it turned out somewhat neat – I ended up taking thirty-something photos today, just around the house, and around town, and I’ve showcased the ones that worked out really well here.

Oh, and in case you’re curious, this is how to turn your dSLR into a pinhole camera. Take your dust cover cap (that lovely bit that covers your camera sensor when you don’t have a lens attached) and a small drill bit. Drill a hole in the centre, and make sure you tidy it up after – we wouldn’t want any pesky plastic pieces getting your sensor dirty when you attach it to your camera body. Next, take some tinfoil and a bit of electrical tape, tape it to the inside cover of the dust cap, and use a pin to poke a hole through the middle of the tinfoil. Attach to your camera, and voila! It took some internet researching and a bit of experimentation before we realized that was the best way to do things. At first, I (with the help of Tim) melted a pinhole directly into the dust cap, but it wasn’t perfect, and I ended up with a lot of shadowing on one side of my images. The method with the tinfoil worked a lot better.

Note the black shadowing in the left hand corner for the next couple of photos, and the level of blurriness of them overall.

Canon Rebel XS. 6 sec, ISO 400.
yhe book that inspired the idea. this is the first photo I attempted to take that turned out, before we tried the tinfoil method.
such a dreamy photo.

Canon Rebel XS. 4 sec, ISO 400.
Cedric moved while I was testing out my depth of field. a bit of Lightroom post-processing turned it black and white.

Canon Rebel XS. 4 sec, ISO 400.
another Cedric photo – he looked away, and looked back.
eerie.

For this next photo, I tried to fix the shadowing that I was getting from the “melting pinhole” method. I used the pin again, heated up until it was red over a candle flame, and tried to straighten the pinhole. The initial problem was that the pinhole wasn’t 90 degrees to the cover cap, and the slight angle was making a shadow. I…made it worse by trying to fix it.

Canon Rebel XS. 20 sec, ISO 400.
pinhole photography should just be called “dreamy and ethereal hipster photography” …I feel like this belongs on Instagram.

After making my photos significantly worse, we looked up the proper way to turn a dust cap into a pinhole lens. All the photos that follow are done using tinfoil and electrical tape, taped over a hole made by a drill bit.

Canon Rebel XS. 13 sec, ISO 400.
the clearest photo yet. you can even make out words!

Canon Rebel XS. 8 sec, ISO 400.
Christmas is in the air (it just doesn’t want to die)

Canon Rebel XS. 30 sec, ISO 400.
R2D2 wanted to make an appearance.

It seemed by this point of the afternoon, that the pinhole photography test was indeed a success, and it needed some full daylight experimentation. (Read: we just wanted to go for a walk in the snow)